Mott Haven and Melrose Had City's Fourth Highest Number of Stop-and-Frisks

SOUTH BRONX — More than 58,000 South Bronx residents were stopped by police in 2011, with nearly 18,000 of those stops in Mott Haven and Melrose’s 40th Precinct — the fourth highest total of any precinct in the city, according to a report released by the Police Department late Monday.

Though Monday marked the first time the NYPD publicly released stop-and-frisk data broken down by precinct and race, the New York Civil Liberties Union previously had sued and obtained access to the data, which it analyzed in a report last May.

Four of the five citywide precincts where black and Hispanic residents made up the highest share of people stopped — 98 percent or more — fell in The Bronx, according to the NYCLU analysis. The NYPD report, which includes 2010 Census data, shows that at least 97 percent or more of the total residents of those precincts are also black or Hispanic.

Citywide, 53 percent of people stopped in 2011 were black New Yorkers, though they account for just 23 percent of the population.

About 34 percent of people stopped were Hispanic, while they make up about 29 percent of the population. Just over 9 percent of stops were of whites, who account for 34 percent of all New Yorkers.

Of the four South Bronx precincts — the 40th, 41st, 42nd and 44th — Mott Haven and Melrose’s 40th Precinct had the most stops.

The Concourse and Highbridge area’s 44th Precinct came in second with nearly 17,000 stops — the ninth highest number of all city precincts.

In all four precincts, black and Hispanic Bronxites made up 98 percent or more of those stopped in 2011. They also account for 97 percent or more all of residents in those precincts, according to the NYPD report.

The racial breakdown of those stopped in all four precincts roughly comports with the number of "all known crime suspects" in those areas, according to the report.

The NYPD report did not provide information about how often police also frisked the people they stopped.

But the NYCLU analysis, using the department’s database, found that cops frisked a little over half — or 56 percent — of the individuals they stopped in 2011.

In The Bronx’s 44th Precinct, though, police frisked 78 percent of those they stopped, according to the NYCLU report.

Citywide, officers used force — which can range from placing their hands on a person to drawing their guns — in just over a fifth of all stops, according to the NYCLU.

But in the 44th Precinct, cops used force in about half of all stops, or 8,400 times — more than in any other city precinct, the NYCLU analysis found.

The most common reason cops stopped people was the suspicion that they were carrying a weapon, which officers cited in about a quarter of all stops, according to the NYPD.

Police recovered 780 guns from all the stops made in 2011, they said.

The NYPD report does not list how many guns were recovered per stop-and-frisk per precinct or how many people were ticketed and arrested as a result of stops in each precinct.

Brett Stoudt, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and John Jay College and a member of the Morris Justice Project, which surveyed residents about police stops in part of the 44th Precinct, said the NYPD report excludes some key figures from that precinct.

Only 40 guns were found and 1,776 people arrested or ticketed as a result of the nearly 17,000 stops in the 44th Precinct in 2011, according to Stoudt’s analysis of police data.

The police are “highlighting certain things, but nothing that they’re highlighting gets to the overall point,” Stoudt said, “which is that nearly all [those stopped] are innocent and that very few stops result in getting weapons off the street.”

In about nine out of ten stops citywide in 2011, the person stopped was neither ticketed nor arrested, according to the NYCLU.

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